Made in Abyss and characters going through brutal things

September 16, 2017

So what happened is that I saw someone on Twitter wondering if they
should catch up on Made in Abyss, because they'd heard (and seen
from screenshots) that some brutal and unpleasant things happened
to the characters and were partly wondering if the show was being
gratuitous with them. This sparked a stream of thoughts on Twitter:

Made in Abyss's latest episodes are wrenching and powerful, but are
they necessary? And is this a question that matters?

I don't think MiA's events were gratuitous or overdone & things mostly
focused on the emotional impact. The body horror was probably needed.

'Body horror' is not quite the right description for 'people getting hurt
badly', but Twitter has length limits. The show definitely presented
the situation in a way that was intended to make it wrenching;
this was not pleasant, pretty, antiseptic stuff, it was visceral
and cringe-inducing and painful to watch. Within the context of the
episodes I don't think the show dwelt on things in a way that would
have made it torture porn or pain porn; the focus was very much on how
all of these horrible things affected the characters, especially Reg.
The horrible things got shown to give Reg's reactions context and weight,
and the show framed things claustrophobically to focus on this (cf,
which has spoilers).

As for the overall necessity, we have to wait and see how the story
develops. I think there are early promising signs based on Nanachi.

That the events in the episode are non-gratuitous doesn't necessarily
mean that the episode itself (and those events) are actually necessary.
We won't know how necessary the events were overall until we see the
story and the show's themes develop more. However, I think there are
already clear promising signs, because the course of the story has
clearly shifted after the events of episode 10.

Story elements don't necessarily have to have a point; they can be
there for emotional impact. But terror and pain are empty w/o a
meaning.
Made in Abyss certainly delivered emotional impact. Whether it used
too much terror & pain for that is still open and also a personal
call.

This is the question of whether the question in my initial tweet even matters.
If Made in Abyss episodes 10 and 11 evoke such a strong emotional
reaction from us, do they have to be 'necessary' in the larger scale
of the plot? After all, stories are in large part about the emotional
reactions they evoke and episode 10 certainly did that.

I don't have an answer but I do have an opinion, which is that some
ways of evoking emotional responses are cheaper, easier, and more
shallow than others. Kicking a puppy is a bad cliche for a good reason.
Tormenting characters just to get a reaction from the audience is lazy
and unappealing, and in the process it lessens the impact of the entire
work. I personally don't think that Made in Abyss has crossed this line,
but then I'm a jaded anime watcher.

(And I will admit that there are caution signs in some things in Made in
Abyss, things that came up in passing that I'm not sure really needed to
be there. Some of these questionable bits have been there from early on in
the show.)

While I can admire the general artistry and effort put into the production of Made in Abyss, personally, I find the narrative itself pretty cold and off-putting. Even setting aside the questionable use of what amounts to child torture in its recent episodes, while the artwork has been consistently engaging, the actual story-telling has been fairly clinical and oddly specific. For me, at least, Riko's detailed narrations about various aspects of the Abyss haven't amounted to effective world-building, but rather, a kind of distancing and detachment from the both the characters and their adventure. It's like the show is holding the viewer at arm's length, over-explaining things to the point where I'm watching it as some kind of fantastical nature show, rather than as the journey of discovery I'm assuming it's intended to be.